Conversational Agents for Older Adults (CA4OA)

Conversational Agents for Older Adults (CA4OA)

Trustworthy conversational agents (CAs) can help older adults (OAs) as a flexible means to access basic services such as online banking where the shift to CAs is fast. However, OAs tend not to adopt CAs due to the lack of trust and cannot benefit from them. Consequently, OAs may become digitally marginalised and excluded from digitalised society. It is timely to study with interdisciplinary approaches how design choices of CAs (modality, embodiment, anthropomorphism) and OAs’ mental models, attributes (e.g., gender) and conditions (e.g., loneliness) are related to trust in CAs. Design guidelines and prototypes for OA-specific CAs will be delivered.

CA4OA is a research project funded by UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS) Hub.

Project Team

• PI: Professor Effie Lai-Chong Law, Department of Computer Science
• CoI: Dr. Thuy-Vy Nguyen, Department of Psychology
• CoI: Dr. Felix Irresberger, School of Business
• Partner: Age UK Teesside
• Partner: Atom Bank

Project Aims

• Aim 1: Identifying evidence-based design guidelines for older adult-specific CAs.
• Aim 2: Developing deep understandings of how older adults’ attributes and conditions, especially loneliness, impact trust in CAs, and how older adults’ attitudes towards AI-based autonomous systems may change through actual contacts with them.
• Aim 3: Empowering older adults to calibrate trust in CAs by designing appropriate explanations (XAI) as well as risk alerts contingent on CAs’ behaviour and performance.